Another Tuesday, another rant. This is a very special Tuesday Rant because my hands are frozen from the cold (office heating here in Brussels is not working great today). So I'm typing this with heavy gloves while sipping hot lemon vodka from a flask. Excuse the occasional slip as the cold and the vodka fight it out for control of the old grey matter.
First a progress update. We're working on PCIPWs, and will have this in testing very soon. Also, we've almost finished all the leftovers. I'm munching the last fried turkey beaks right now. Hmm, crunchy.
But today's rant is going to have a serious purpose. I'm really annoyed, by my own failure to produce the bugs.wikidot.com site (no link, there's no point) and we're now seeing bug reports pop up in various places. So I'm going to stick my neck out, like the poor turkey we ate last week, and say, time to get cracking on this.
Normally, I'd start a committee to discuss the issue and draft a white paper that can be distributed, reviewed, corrected, and eventually released as a draft green paper. Who knows, before the world ends in 2012 (and that was either the best surrealistic dream sequence movie ever made, or the biggest pile of turkey droppings in history), we might even get started on the work.
Since we're too understaffed (read, hung over) to organize a committee, I'm going to do what in technical terms is called "consulting with the community"1 and ask you to speak your mind:
What do you need from an official public bug tracker?
- What is a bug, (as compared to a feature request)?
- How do we organize and classify bugs? ('annoying', 'really annoying', 'so annoying I want to reach for a fork')
- What kind of status information do you need on progress ('ignored', 'still ignored', 'ignored so long there is green stuff growing over it')
- What kind of discussion model do we need on bugs?
- Who can report bugs and comment on them?
- How are bug fixes tied into the changelog, do we duplicate it or just show a list of recently fixed bugs?
- Should we just open up the current issue tracker (which is pretty complex) or make a simpler cleaner tool that anyone can use?
Other than NIH, what requirements/needs/etc. do you have that aren't satisfied by an existing defect management system (bugzilla, JIRA, etc.)?
Why reinvent the wheel, when your limited engineering resources could add value to the Wikidot platform, like multiple identities under one login (a shameless plug for one of my most looked-for enhancements)?
We eat our own dogfood.
That means, any site that is meant to do some form of communication we make with Wikidot. There are many reasons for this but the main ones are:
I've written half a dozen complete bug trackers and used many others like Jira but we can do better, simpler, using Wikidot.
Lastly, by using Wikidot for this and building a bug tracker in user space we actually save on development resources. Installing alien software would (apart from being horrid in the ways I listed) distract developers. I don't need them to make a bug tracker in Wikidot.
A good example of an app built like this is the projects forum.
Portfolio
I would favor a return to pro.wikidot.com but
I agree - we should use the "Pro" Site or a "derivate" from it
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
I think that it should be a step by step thing. Let's use a fun scenario:
On tuesday, I submit a bug saying that a certain wikidot function, that I think should work, doesn't work. By wednesday, I might have some comments giving me a workaround. Since I just submitted a bug report, my report goes under the "unclassified" category, with no tags. When a moderator comes along, and looks at this bug, he should classify it with one of 6 priority alerts:
Priority-5: Not a major bug, and should easily be pushed aside for more important things.
Priority-4: Still not a major bug, but should be looked into.
Priority-3: Not a major bug, but not a minor bug either. These should be looked into as soon as possible.
Priority-2: This is a bug which needs a fix quickly, because it prevents wikidot users from doing ordinary tasks like logging in, or loading a page. (Hence why bug reports can be submitted by anonymous.
Priority-1: This should have been fixed yesterday…
Priority-0: You probably won't see this, because if a bug is this priority level, it probably means wikidot crashed…
When a wikidot moderator classifies this, it goes in the "noticed" group, meaning that a moderator has seen this and classified it. The "priority-#" tag should also be added. When someone who can fix these issues goes through, and sees. "Priority-2: Users are unable to log in." This should be immediately fixed, and so he goes and, however you reprogram wikidot, fixes it. The Tags are removed, and the bug is sent to the resolved category with a PM to the user who submitted it.
This is just a rough model, but I would be happy to give more ideas. btw, how do you change the code, re-compile, and then put the server online, without crashing the whole thing?
I know it's bad form to comment on one's own posting but… I'm really waiting for forms to work so that I can design a neat layout for bugs, with priorities, etc.
Portfolio
I happen to agree with you. I am constantly seeing people create pages on my wiki, but adding no content or files to them (when the whole point of creating the page was to upload a zip file for the community, so it's not as if they didn't realise they were meant to upload something)
The few people I've got responses from all agree with one thing - the user interface is too confusing.
Improvement of the data forms feature would go a long way towards fixing this, but we also need a more user-friendly file uploading method… instead of the links appearing off the screen where nobody can find them.
Bug tracker… back on topic. Hmm.
@ graphmastur
I didn't read your whole post, but I think things should be kept as simple as possible. 6 priority alerts is far too many in my (personal) opinion.
That having been said, I think it's a good idea to open up your internal bug tracker pieter, for read-only access to all wikidot users, and only editing rights for developers. That would be a perfect way for us to see what you're working on, and how distant our most wanted features are from completion.
A separate, far simplified site would be created at bugs.wikidot.com for all users to edit and contribute to, which the developers (and possibly a few people willing to help) would then move the most important ones into the internal bug tracker if they don't already exist there.
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
I'd be glad to help, where I can. I program mostly in java, so I don't know much about server, so much as client side. I can help where needed, though.